Two recent sources have separately described a promising way to use OpenURL link resolvers and OA repositories to help libraries generate data on the journals that their users cite, search, read, and publish in. The first is the August 22 open letter from several UK scholars (Tim Berners-Lee et al.) rebutting the ALPSP objections to the draft RCUK policy. The second is an October 7 AmSci posting by Tim Brody.
We know that OA archiving can improve an article's citation impact, which can improve the impact factor of the publishing journal. What's new is that if we draw the right kinds of data from OA repository traffic, then libraries will be able to make more intelligent subscription decisions, not just more intelligent cancellation decisions. Journals can help generate these benefits by encouraging authors to deposit their work in OA repositories, not just on personal web sites. Finally, the data could help measure impact at the article level, which helps authors and readers more than measurements at the journal level.
Excerpt from the open letter:
"[P]ublishers and institutional repositories can and will easily work out a collaborative system of pooled usage statistics, all credited to the publisher's official version....The easiest thing in the world for Institutional Repositories (IRs) to provide to publishers (along with the link from the self-archived supplement in the IR to the official journal version on the publisher's website -- something that is already dictated by good scholarly practice) is the IR download statistics for the self-archived version of each article. These can be pooled with the download statistics for the official journal version and all of it (rightly) credited to the article itself....All these statistics and benefits are there to be shared between publishers, librarians and research institutions in a cooperative, collaborative atmosphere that welcomes the benefits of self-archiving to research and that works to establish a system that shares them among the interested parties. Collaboration on the sharing of the benefits of self-archiving is what learned societies should be setting up meetings to do -- rather than just trying to delay and oppose what is so obviously a substantial and certain benefit to research, researchers, their institutions and funders, as well as a considerable potential benefit to journals, publishers and libraries....Librarians' decisions about which journals to renew or cancel take into account a variety of comparative measures, citation statistics being one of them (footnote 2). Self-archiving has now been analysed extensively and shown to increase journal article citations substantially in field after field; so journals carrying self-archived articles will have higher impact factors, and will hence perform better under this measure in competing for their share of libraries' serials budgets...
Excerpt from Tim Brody's posting:
I can have a lot of fun with hypothetical scenarios, in particular how open access could provide more in depth usage and impact analytical tools for librarians. The situation now is that journal usage metrics are being used because it provides easy access to comparative institution-specific information for user's online 'reading'. (Although is there evidence to show cancellation based on usage stats?) So let us suppose that an institution's authors are self-archiving 90%+ their own material into the institutional archive. The librarian can then discover which journals their authors are : (1) publishing in, (2) editing, (3) citing. An OpenURL resolver is used that points users automatically at the journal version (where subscribed), or an author self-archived version (where available). That resolver will provide the institutional manager with information on usage, journal interconnectedness etc. The resolver naturally aggregates open access and subscription content usage. Perhaps attempts by users to access an unsubscribed journal will be drawn to the librarian's attention. The institutional archive records logs of who accesses its content, and provides those logs to a 3rd party service that aggregates data across commercial and open access sources. The service then provides summary reports, as a comparative 'web impact' metric for journals (/authors/institutions/publishers).
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/07/2005 03:31:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
